We Americans have some grotesquely peculiar attitudes about the subject of death.

We tend to avoid discussing it. We don’t want to think about it. We view the misfortunate on the verge of death as already dead, as if they’re walking skeletons with nothing to contritbute to our greater understanding of who we are, or what life means. How tragic and this mindset is.

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If you stand and listen long enough, you begin to hear whispers in the wind.

Perfectly peaceful, there’s something far too orderly about a war cemetery cradling the lifeless remains of those who unwittingly made the ultimate sacrifice.

One wishes places like this didn’t exist, and never existed. It seems so utterly bewildering that they must exist at all. But so long as some men foolishly follow the orders of other men and believe the lies they’re told about still other men, oblivious to imminent peril, there will always be places on every continent, in every country like the Mierlo War Cemetery in Holland.

Drive but a few kilometers east of Geldrop, down a lonely roadway engulfed by a canopy of oak trees, and you’re liable to miss it, there on the left side, except for the red sign marking a green meadow cluttered with rectangular white stones. Maintained with great dignity by the Dutch Government at the behest of Great Britain, this is the final resting place of British soldiers who were part of the wave of what would eventually become the liberation of Europe during World War II, thus putting an end to human history’s most deadly conflict.